Its not often that Im left stymied when reviewing a disc. Personally, I tend to get a clear vibe on something shortly after firing it up, and that gut feeling is rarely wrong. Until I encountered Frequency, I couldnt ever recall feeling so indecisive about a game. I got a lot of mixed signals while playing it, and just didnt know what to make of it.

'What is art?' is one of those questions for the ages that no two persons will agree on, but almost everyone will undoubtedly have an opinion. While it is simply impossible to explore the infinite depth of the question to any great extent in the confines of a 1000 word game review (about a Rasslin' videogame no less), I think most can agree that art has plenty to do with self-expression.

Anyone who reads GameCritics.com regularly will know that I'm not a big fan of first-person shooter (FPS) games. I don't hate them, but I don't think it's particularly fun to just run around and blast things, either. Most of the games tend to be very repetitious and unimaginative, and the genre has rarely captured my attention. Being the non-fragger that I am, I was particularly interested to check out Half-Life.

Trying to gauge which game was the first to blur the line between game and movie is a daunting task (and one sure to inspire more than a few arguments). However, the game that tends to stand out as one of the first to do it effectively is Half-Life—a classic PC game that is now making its debut on the PlayStation 2 gaming console.

Gamers today are blessed with some amazingly powerful consoles, quite capable of things that were impossible just a few years ago. Unfortunately, along with such power comes a price. With the current wave of advanced boxes, were seeing record numbers of PC games being ported to home systems.

Mega-Publisher Eidos, one of the largest and most powerful companies in videogames today, has taken notice of a small but growing fanbase here in America. The people targeted? Gamers who crave something fresh. Rather than be sated solely with the next by-the-numbers FPS or 3D adventure title, they're looking for those rare, rough-edged fringe projects so full of creativity that they don't fit cleanly into any one genre.

Videogames have come under heavy criticism in recent years for conventions they refuse to retire, conventions that, the argument goes, are rendered absurd by the graphical realism and sophisticated 3D environments that have become commonplace. The RPG genre in particular has been the target of much of this criticism, but the reason is fairly complicated.

The world of the Yakuza is full of honor, violence and history. Many people simply pass off the Japanese gangsters as similar to the United State's Mafia. But that betrays the deep history of the Yakuza, which some believe stretches back to the extended period of peace in Japan during the Tokagawa era. Since the services of the Samurai were no longer needed, an increase in the number of Ronin—leaderless Samurai—was seen throughout Japan. Seeing as how they were no longer under the thumb of their masters, they turned to crime. Thus the Japanese gangster was born.

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